Integrated implosion/heating studies for advanced fast ignition

Integrated experiments to investigate the ultrafast heating of implosions using cone/shell geometries have been performed at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory. The experiments used the 1054 nm, nanosecond, 0.9 kJ output of the VULCAN Nd:glass laser to drive 486 mum diameter, 6 mum wall thickness Cu-doped deuterated plastic (CD) shells in 6-beam cubic symmetry. Measurements of the opacity of the compressed plasma using two-dimensional spatially resolved Ti-K-alpha x-ray radiography suggest that densities of 4 g cm-3 and areal densities of 40 mg cm-2 were achieved at stagnation. Upper limits on the heating with both 1 ps and 10 ps pulses were deduced from the fluorescent yield from the Cu dopant. The data suggest that control of the preformed plasma scale-length inside the cone is necessary for efficient coupling to the compressed plasma. (C) 2004 American Institute of Physics.